Flinging birds and slaying pigs with your thoughts

[Rafael Mizrahi and Anat Sambol] decided that Angry Birds was missing one crucial element – mind control. They grabbed a copy of the game for their netbook and [Rafael] strapped on an Emotiv EPOC headset to see if he could play it without using a mouse or keyboard. While he was able to move the cursor around with his thoughts, he found that Emotiv’s EmoKey software lacked any sort of mouse button support. Undaunted, they turned to the Internet for help and found that he could map the Emotiv’s output to his mouse via another application, GlovePie.

As you can see in the video below their efforts were successful, though we doubt [Rafael] will be completely giving up his mouse just yet. With some more refinement, we imagine [Rafael] will be blasting pigs to kingdom come in no time.

If you are interested in trying this yourself, be aware that only the SDK version of the EPOC headset can be paired with 3rd party applications, the standard consumer version is locked into using solely authorized software.

Continue reading if you would like to see a video of their Angry Birds neural interface in action.

28 thoughts on “Flinging birds and slaying pigs with your thoughts”

Hacker uses software and hardware for its intended purpose, more at 10!
Perhaps getting the locked-down verstion of the hardware (or software) to work in debug mode just as this does would be quite noteworthy however.
Guess it’s my turn to be grumpy.

To everyone moaning, I say this: Perhaps this was featured because it might inspire something even more ingenious, or purely because it’s awesome.

If it doesn’t interest you, fine, no-one’s forcing you to read, and CERTAINLY no-one’s forcing you to write bitchy comments.

I don’t complain when an article isn’t relevant to me, because it’s probably relevant to someone! Yes, this may be an example of using the software and hardware for it’s intended purpose, but it show’s what’s possible with the two, an application that I had not considered. If you had, good for you, but don’t moan about it!

So next time you go to complain about an article not being relevant to you, think about if it’s relevant to other’s first. The whole world doesn’t revolve around YOU!

don’t see what all the whining is about. maybe its not the most a-team of hacks, but its quite illustrative of some methods that may be of interest to the wider audience for other hacksnmods. i actually like this kind of post, interspersed with other hardcore hacks.

@DarkFader: Hehe, I suspect you were only joking, but I love the idea of firing the birds by feeling angry!

I’m ashamed to admit that despite being a psychology student, I’m not sure if this could be done (at all, let alone with this particular brain-wave reader) though, I’m sure one could cheat and do it by blood pressure or something :P

The Basic version of EPOC headset (as opponent to the SDK version) comes with a free mapping software which lets you map “thoughts” and “facial impression” to keyboard key strokes. you can use such key mapping to control 3rd party applications.